The term “institutionalization” is a difficult one to define as applied to the Presidency. It is generally operationalized as synonymous with the expansion of the Executive Office of the President. It certainly has meaning in much broader terms than this, however. It involves, at the very least, formal constitutional developments relative to the office, informal, political developments relative to the office including especially recent developments in presidential-congressional relations, and the evolving national and international public image of the office as well as the development of staff.
However, the merits of this “institutionalization” (in the narrow sense) of the American Presidency have been the subject of heated debate. The debate is a familiar one and it is not necessary for us to consider it in detail here. Professors Rossiter and Corwin, both writing in the mid-1950’s under the immediate influence of the Eisenhower White House, are able spokesmen for the opposing sides of the argument. Rossiter viewed Executive Order 8248 as the salvation of the Presidency and the Constitution:
I have already pointed out, with the help of Professor White, the momentous administrative significance of this development in the modern Presidency. Its constitutional significance, it seems to me, is even more momentous. It converts the Presidency into an instrument of twentieth-century government; it gives the incumbent a sporting chance to stand the strain and fulfill his constitutional mandate as a one-man branch of our three-part government; it deflates even the most forceful arguments, which are still raised occasionally, for a plural executive; it assures us that the Presidency will survive the advent of the positive state. Executive Order 8248 may yet be judged to have saved the Presidency from paralysis and the Constitution from radical amendment.
Corwin, on the other hand, a critic of the Brownlow Committee from the very beginning, viewed the institutionalization of the American Presidency with alarm. As he saw it, most of the dangers of institutionalization had been fulfilled in the Eisenhower administration. The tendency toward “bureaucratization” had been fulfilled and Eisenhower was “reigning rather than ruling” to an extent that, when he became ill in midterm and was incapacitated for a lengthy period of time, “the 'administration' went on notwithstanding the disaster with scarcely a tremor.” However, even Corwin concluded that “the office remains highly personal.” Corwin’s answer, of course, was a new type of Cabinet which would stabilize the relationship between the President and Congress.
Now, nearly three decades after Executive Order 8248 and more than a decade and two administrations after Professors Rossiter and Corwin wrote, precisely what has been the impact of expanded staff facilities on the American Presidency? What have been the most salient characteristics of the “institutionalization” of the office? Is the President, in fact, still free “both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can”?
In order to begin to try to answer these questions, the present study is an effort to analyze the role of one aspect of the expanded presidential staff, the professional staff in the White House Office, since 1939. How have the five presidents in the period organized their staffs? What have been the work patterns of the staff members? What kind of men have served in the White House Office iT and how did they view their work? What role has the professional staff of the White House Office played in presidential] decision-making?
Political scientists have conducted very little research on these questions and most of the studies that are available were completed in the 1950’s. Edward